A University of Sussex PhD thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details White 1 UNDOING ‘YOU’: BLINDNESS AND SECOND SIGHT IN THE SECOND-PERSON NOVEL Kristian White Professor Nicholas Royle Creative & Critical D. Phil. 01 February 2016 White 2 DECLARATION: I hereby declare that this thesis is my original work and has not been, nor will be, submitted in whole or in part to another university for the award of any other degree. Signed………Kristian White……Date…10/11/2016………….. White 3 Acknowledgements: I would like to thank my parents, Lynne and Reginald White, and my supervisor, Professor Nicholas Royle, for inspiring my research. White 4 Contents Summary ................................................................................................................................................ 5 Preface .................................................................................................................................................... 6 Introduction: You are (not) ................................................................................................................... 9 Chapter One. Undoing definitions of ‘second-person’ ..................................................................... 21 Only ‘You’ ........................................................................................................................................ 21 Waking up as ‘you’: Self-hypnosis .................................................................................................. 31 Chapter Two. How to get by with no ‘I’s’ ......................................................................................... 36 Self-Blinding .................................................................................................................................... 36 Writing the Rat Man ........................................................................................................................ 41 Chapter Three. Echographies of ‘the now’: Exposing the blind spots in ....................................... 57 Bright Lights, Big City and 1984 ........................................................................................................ 57 The need for speed .......................................................................................................................... 57 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................... 67 Works Cited.......................................................................................................................................... 70 Appendix .............................................................................................................................................. 73 White 5 Summary Wayne C. Booth’s famous claim in The Rhetoric of Fiction (1967) that “efforts to use the second person have never been very successful” is widely considered outdated in light of the many theoretical publications about second-person narrative that followed. What critics tend to overlook when dismissing Booth is that although shorter works of second-person narrative are relatively abundant and ever more frequently occurring, novels written entirely in second-person number only a few and, of these, only Michel Butor’s La Modification and Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City might be described as having wider literary appeal or success. My ‘Creative and Critical’ project is an innovative way of thinking about what it is that gives the second-person novel its peculiar appeal and makes it so difficult to write. In turn, my observations from this research contribute to the understanding of second-person narrative as a whole. My research consists of two mutually informative parts: a novel entirely in second-person and a critical thesis that seeks to provide a different history of second-person narrative. By reading a range of second-person texts in conjunction with Sigmund Freud’s Some Remarks on a Case of Obsessive-Compulsive Neurosis: the ‘Rat Man’, Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight, and other key works, I argue that what gives a novel like Butor’s or McInerney’s its appeal is a narrative strategy of ‘undoing’: set in motion by a moment of self-blinding, that instant where you realise that ‘you’ are not who you think you are, the second-person novel moves through a point of view of second sight, where you experience a world that derealises and denarrates all boundaries of conventional thinking. White 6 Preface My interest in second-person narrative began in the mid nineteen-eighties with the fashion for Choose Your Own Adventure books, written in the second person. It struck me that there was something very futuristic about a book, where, as the tagline of the Fighting Fantasy range stated, ‘You are the Hero’, and even as a child, I found myself wondering if this new form indicated a significant change in how we thought about the novel. However, this genre was soon forgotten about, subsumed by the widespread emergence of home computers equipped with video games and software that appeared to adopt this position of interaction in a more visually stimulating and addictive way. Twenty years after this, during my time on a Creating Writing MA, I was planning the writing of a novel set in a busy city hair salon which sought to convey something of the ten years I had spent working in front of a mirror, faced with a seemingly endless row of customers. The subject of the Choose Your Own Adventure phenomenon arose in a discussion with fellow students and somebody asked me if I had read Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney, which I admitted I had not. McInerney’s use of the ‘you’ voice to satirise 1980s Manhattan life fascinated me. The only way I could describe this narrative at the time was – oddly as it seemed – that the voice seemed to possess a sheen, like a first-person narrative coated with a layer of gloss that made it feel more real. After reading McInerney’s novel, it occurred to me that this might be a suitable narrative voice to describe the similarly chaotic and claustrophobic cityscape I wanted to portray: a world where image was everything, appointment times were strictly adhered to and being quick was the difference between having and losing your job. Invigorated and eager to finish my first draft, I sped into writing The Cutting Block but no matter how I tried, I just couldn’t seem to get it to work. After consulting with writers and associates about this difficulty, a couple of problems came to light. Firstly, I was surprised to discover that I was far from alone in trying to write a novel in the second person. In fact, almost all writers I consulted with had thought about or attempted to write one at some point, with one particular lecturer of Creative Writing commenting that for some reason she had been unable to fathom, about four chapters into her novel it just stopped working. Secondly, that despite this enthusiasm for the ‘you’ voice amongst writers – with there being an abundance of short stories, alternating chapters, instances and flash fictions emerging – there were remarkably few published novels written entirely as ‘you’. The few that existed were generally short novels consisting of White 7 between 15 and 30 thousand words, with only a couple that exceeded 40 thousand words. It began to occur to me that writing a novel in this narrative voice was not simply a matter of replacing the ‘I’s or ‘s/he’s with ‘you’ to gain an instantaneous effect of immediacy as I had first assumed, but that it required an entirely different approach that involved changing my own way of thinking about the world. With this in mind, I tried to simulate the narrative of a second-person novel. One of the first experiments I performed was, literally, to hold a mirror to nature. I started to go about my daily business using a pocket mirror or mobile phone to narrate my thoughts and actions directly to my reflection. This approach, I thought, might account for the effect achieved by McInerney in Bright Lights, Big City, where the protagonist feels trapped by the seductive imperatives of a shallow consumer world. With the inspiration of the mirror image, I set about a second draft of my novel, but I soon realized that although speaking to myself in this way provided a clean narrative – one that avoided difficulties such as mixing the ‘you’ that designates in part a protagonist with the hypothetical ‘you’ – it did not seem to overcome the repetitive and slightly irritating tone the voice took on after a few chapters. Taking a step back, I started to think about a different history of the second-person novel and what had prompted writers such as McInerney to adopt it. My first discovery of importance was that although the second-person short story had existed since early in the nineteenth century, the second-person novel had appeared much later in 1957, shortly after the emergence of the household